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Early life

Douglas Hartree was born in Cambridge, England. His father, William, was a lecturer in engineering at Cambridge University and his mother, Eva Rayner, was president of the National Council of Women and mayor of the city of Cambridge. One of his great-grandfathers was Samuel Smiles;[1] another was the marine engineer William Hartree, partner of John Penn.[4] He was the oldest of three sons, although his two younger brothers did not survive to adulthood. He attended St John's College, Cambridge but the first World War interrupted his studies. He joined a group working on anti-aircraft ballistics under A. V. Hill, where he gained considerable skill and an abiding interest in practical calculation and numerical methods for differential equations, executing most of his own work with pencil and paper.[5]

After the end of World War I, Hartree returned to Cambridge graduating in 1922 with a Second Class degree in natural sciences.

The first application of the machine, reflecting Hartree's enthusiasm for railways, was calculating timetables for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway. [6] He spent the rest of the decade applying the differential analyser to find solutions of differential equations arising in physics. These included control theory and laminar boundary layer theory in fluid dynamics making significant contributions to each of the fields.

The differential analyser was not suitable for the solution of equations with exchange. When Fock's publication pre-empted Hartree's work on equations with exchange, Hartree turned his research to radio-wave propagation that led to the Appleton–Hartree equation. In 1935, his father, William Hartree, offered to do calculations for him. Results with exchange soon followed. Douglas recognised the importance of configuration interaction that he referred to as "superposition of configurations". The first multiconfiguration Hartree–Fock results were published by father, son, and Bertha Swirles (later Lady Jeffreys) in 1939.

At Hartree's suggestion, Bertha Swirles proceeded to derive equations with exchange for atoms using the Dirac equation in 1935. With Hartree's advice, the first relativistic calculations (without exchange) were reported in 1940 by A. O. Williams, a student of R. B. Lindsay.

Second World War

During the Second World War Hartree supervised two computing groups. The first group, for the Ministry of Supply, has been described by Jack Howlett[7] as a "job shop" for the solution of differential equations. At the outbreak of World War II, the differential analyser at the University of Manchester was the only full-size (eight integrator) differential analyser in the country. Arrangements were made to have the machine available for work in support of the national war effort. In time, the group consisted of four members[8] (front to back: Jack Howlett, Nicholas R. Eyres, J. G. L. Michel; center, Douglas Hartree; right Phyllis Lockett Nicolson). Problems were submitted to the group without information about the source but included the automatic tracking of targets, radio propagation, underwater explosions, heat flow in steel, and the diffusion equation later found to be for isotope separation. The second group was the magnetron research group of Phyllis Lockett Nicolson, David Copely, and Oscar Buneman. The work was done for the Committee for the Co-ordination of the Valve Development assisting the development of radar. A differential analyser could have been used if more integrators had been available, so Hartree set up his group as three "CPUs" to work on mechanical desk calculators in parallel. For a method of solution he selected what is now a classical particle simulation.[9] Hartree never published any of his magnetron research findings in journals though he wrote numerous highly technical secret reports during the war.

In April 1944 a committee which included Hartree recommended that a mathematical section be set up within the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). In October this recommendation was put into effect with its first two objectives being the investigation of the possible adaptation of automatic telephone equipment to scientific equipment and the development of electronic computing devices suitable for rapid computing. One suspects that some members already knew of the Colossus computer. John R. Womersley (Turing's bête noire) was the first Director. In February 1945 he went on a two-month tour of computing installations in the USA, including visiting ENIAC (still not complete). He became acquainted with drafts of von Neumann's famous June 1945 EDVAC report. About two months later Hartree also went over to see ENIAC, not then publicly known.

Hartree did further work in control systems and was involved in the early application of digital computers, advising the US military on the use of ENIAC for calculating ballistics tables. In the summer of 1946 Hartree made his second trip to ENIAC as an evaluation of its applicability to a broad range of science, when he became the first civilian to program it. For this he selected a problem involving the flow of a compressible fluid over a surface, such as air over the surface of a wing travelling faster than the speed of sound.[10]

At the end of 1945 or very early in 1946 Hartree briefed Maurice Wilkes of the University of Cambridge on the developments in computing in the USA which he had seen. Wilkes, then received an invitation from the Moore School of Electrical Engineering (the builders of ENIAC) to attend a course on electronic computers. Before leaving for this, Hartree was able to brief him more fully on ENIAC. It was on the boat home that Wilkes planned the original design of EDSAC, which was to become operational in May 1949. Hartree worked closely with Wilkes in developing use of the machine for a wide range of problems and, most importantly, showed users from a number of areas in the university how they could use it in their research work.

Hartree returned to Cambridge to take up the post of Plummer professor of mathematical physics in 1946. In October he gave an inaugural lecture entitled "Calculating Machines: Recent and Prospective Developments and their impact on Mathematical Physics”. This described ENIAC and the work that Hartree had done on it. Even in 1946, two years before stored programming electronic computing became a reality, Hartree saw the need for the use of sub-routines. His inaugural lecture ended with a look at what computers might do. He said: "..there are, I understand many problems of economic, medical and sociological interest and importance awaiting study which at present cannot be undertaken because of the formidable load of computing involved."

On 7 November 1946 the Daily Telegraph, having interviewed Hartree, quoted him as saying: "The implications of the machine are so vast that we cannot conceive how they will affect our civilisation. Here you have something which is making one field of human activity 1,000 times faster. In the field of transportation, the equivalent to ACE would be the ability to travel from London to Cambridge ... in five seconds as a regular thing. It is almost unimaginable."[11]

Hartree's fourth and final major contribution to British computing started in early 1947 when the catering firm of J. Lyons & Co. in London heard of the ENIAC and sent a small team in the summer of that year to study what was happening in the USA, because they felt that these new computers might be of assistance in the huge amount of administrative and accounting work which the firm had to do. The team met with Col. Herman Goldstine at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton who wrote to Hartree telling him of their search. As soon as he received this letter, Hartree wrote and invited representatives of Lyons to come to Cambridge for a meeting with him and Wilkes. This led to the development of a commercial version of EDSAC developed by Lyons, called LEO, the first computer used for commercial business applications. After Hartree's death, the headquarters of LEO Computers was renamed Hartree House. This illustrates the extent to which Lyons felt that Hartree had contributed to their new venture.

Hartree's last famous contribution to computing was an estimate in 1950 of the potential demand for computers, which was much lower than turned out to be the case: "We have a computer here in Cambridge, one in Manchester and one at the [NPL]. I suppose there ought to be one in Scotland, but that's about all." Such underestimates of the number of computers that would be required were common at the time.[12]